As enterprise adoption of desktop and application virtualization grows, enterprises are looking for ways to streamline the management, resource utilization and efficiency of operating these environments. Many enterprises are adopting private cloud architectures to realize the benefits of increased business continuity, greater agility and flexibility, improved resource utilization and increased speed of deployment for their XenDesktop and XenApp environments.

Citrix is dramatically changing the way IT delivers applications, desktops and data to the mobile workforce with solutions that transform any Windows application or desktop into a cloud service delivered across any network, to any device. Citrix XenDesktop and Citrix XenApp with Citrix CloudPlatform provide cloud-enabled application and desktop service delivery from any type of private, public or hybrid cloud, This approach allows enterprises to couple cloud computing with application and desktop virtualization in a single platform to realize their combined benefits of resource optimization, infrastructure agility and cost efficiency. XenDesktop and XenApp with CloudPlatform is the only desktop provisioning automation solution to deliver secure mobile access to a complete collection of apps and desktops.

Challenges in traditional XenDesktop/XenApp environments

Most traditional XenDesktop deployments use leading hypervisors such as Citrix XenServer® or VMware vSphere as a virtualization layer. In small to medium-size deployments, implementation and management are fairly simple. However, as environments scale, hypervisor-based deployments may encounter increased operational complexity and difficulty in scaling on demand to handle unpredictable future needs and provide highly available desktop environments based on user requirements.

Operational complexity

Even though XenApp and XenDesktop are higher-level application workloads, they are somewhat unique in that administrators need a fair amount of understanding of the underlying infrastructure, e.g., compute, storage, networking, etc., to architect, implement and manage the deployment. As they grow, these environments place greater demands on administrators, becoming more complex to deploy, manage or efficiently scale.

Unoptimized capacity

When deploying XenDesktop/XenApp, administrators need a good understanding of current and future scalability requirements so they can accurately architect the environment. Anticipation of future needs is necessary as traditional hypervisor-based deployments do not lend themselves to scaling on demand. If actual demand turns out to be lower than the environment was architected to handle, the result may be costly, wasted capacity. On the other hand, if demand is higher than expected, user experience can suffer due to the lack of resources.

Inability to adapt to end-user needs

In traditional desktop and apps environments, administrators are often unable to tune infrastructure service offerings based on user needs or to provide high availability for desktops or apps.

The solution provides the ability to seamlessly deploy and provision XenDesktop/ XenApp environments on CloudPlatform-based private or public cloud infrastructures. Enterprise IT organizations can now implement a common service delivery architecture for all applications and desktops, leveraging common policies and tools that simplify deployment and management, increase agility and reduce cost.